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Melanie Manchot, ‘Gestures of Demarcation II’, 2001

“Melanie Manchot explores the boundaries of trust and intimacy in a range of works in performance, photography, and video. Gestures of Demarcation (2001) is a series of six photographs in which a naked Manchot faces the camera in a variety of urban and rural environments, while an androgynous figure, facing away from the camera, tugs at the artist’s naked skin. Like a contemporary Saint Sebastian, Manchot seems unaffected by the repeated violation. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece comes to mind (a Happening first enacted in 1964, in which audience members were asked to join the artist onstage and cut away at her clothing), as do several of Marina Abramovic’s performances, in which viewers were invited to interact and even violate the artist’s body with an assortment of implements. By contrast, with Manchot’s works, although we may experience a visceral reaction to the intrusion, the event is enacted solely for the camera and not for a live audience: the viewer is thus never personally implicated in the breach of the artist’s physical boundaries.

To paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body does not occupy space like an object or thing, but instead inhabits, animates, or even haunts space. In Erwin Wurm’s “one-minute sculptures,” the body performs or experiences a slapstick rebuke of personal space and social etiquette. Wurm cloaks his Conceptualism behind the deadpan nature of the snapshot in pictures such as Looking for a Bomb (2003), in which a kneeling man reaches deep into another man’s pants; Inspection (2002), in which a woman sits with a friend in a restaurant while stoically enduring a man’s head thrust deep into her blouse; and the self-explanatory Spit in Someone’s Soup (2003). These rude interventions in the everyday are part of Wurm’s larger project Instructions on How to Be Politically Incorrect.”